The world of Vestiges
Sylkaen is not a young world set on fresh foundations. It is a Crown-World: a land rebuilt by one civilisation after another, each building on the remains of the last without ever erasing them. Today's kingdoms occupy only the topmost layer.
Vestiges is the game, Sylkaen is its world. And Sylkaen is only one world among others within the Cosmos.
What is carved there was not written for you. It was written for someone who no longer exists.
A world built
on its own ruins
Dig beneath a city of Sylkaen and you do not find rock: you find another city, and then another. Four words hold the whole game together.
The Cycles
The great ages of the world. Each had its peoples, its cities, its gods and its own way of making sense of reality. None of them lasted.
The Ruptures
The cataclysms that separate the Cycles. They erase nothing: they bury. Everything that came before still sleeps under the present kingdoms.
The Vestiges
Ruins, machines and phenomena inherited from those dead Cycles, which not even magic explains. You spot them, you dig them out, you decide what to do with them. That is the heart of the game.
The Echo
The most powerful of those objects, the Remnants, answer back when used. Each one drags along the Resonance of the Cycle that saw it made, and that Resonance wants paying.
The First Furrow was not dug. People built around it, then forgot who had opened it.
Five continents
and the sea between them
Six regions, six capitals, and peoples who have never once agreed on who owns what lies underneath.
The central continent, where the kingdoms quarrel and the Wardens of the Vestiges keep watch.
The lands where two Strata touch, scars of the Cosmos left open to the sky.
The isolated high ranges, where the sky-cities look down on the clouds.
The primordial bedrock, hollowed into underground cities older than the kingdoms.
The world-forest whose roots reach down to buried Vestiges.
The world-sea that separates, or connects, the five continents, down to its capital beneath the waves.
Five Strata,
and what lives in them
The Strata are not distant planes you travel to as a last resort. They are the great divisions of the Cosmos, and they leak: one badly closed Threshold, and the Stratum spills into the world. Three playable peoples come straight out of them.
Time
One bridge, intact and ruined, at both ends of its own history
Memory
A courtyard full of people who are no longer there, and who carry on
Silence
A hall where sound stops dead, one step past the threshold
Possibilities
Every step throws up the version of you who took the other door
Metamorphoses
Matter that has not finished deciding what it will be
The Cosmos mapped
The five Strata, the Layers and the Thresholds, on a single map
The Strata, the Layers and the Thresholds that lead to them are mapped in the Game Master's Book.
Gods who were once mortal
The Laws are eternal. The gods are merely ascended: former mortals, each wearing the face of one Law. Fifteen reign today, and not one of them tells the whole truth.
Six of the fifteen. The Player's Book gives them all, with their portrait, their symbol and what their cult expects of a follower.
Ways into Sylkaen
Three doors, depending on what you are after. To play: the 20 playable peoples and the classes in the Player's Book. To run the game: the true History of the Cycles and the deep Cosmos, on the Game Master's Book side. To try it without spending anything: The Hand That Counts, a free 21-page adventure that plays in an evening.
Frequently asked questions about the world
What is the difference between Vestiges and Sylkaen?
Vestiges is the universe: an entire Cosmos, structured into Strata, where the ages follow one another in Cycles. Sylkaen is the world the books take place in: the Crown-World, with its five continents, its world-sea and its sixteen cities. It is the threshold the stories start from. Other worlds exist within the Cosmos, and future releases may explore them.
What are the Cycles and the Ruptures?
The Cycles are the great ages of Sylkaen, each carried by its own civilisations; the Ruptures are the cataclysms that closed them. The present world is built on that stack: the kingdoms occupy only the most recent layer, and everything left of the earlier ages, cities, machines, forgotten gods, makes up the Vestiges the characters dig out. The true History of the Cycles is reserved for the Game Master's Book.
What are the Strata of the Cosmos?
The Strata are the five great divisions of the living Cosmos of Vestiges: Memories, Possibilities, Metamorphoses, Time and Silence. They are not simply distant planes: three playable peoples come straight out of them (Mnesics, Eclipsed, Morphids), and the Game Master's Book maps the Strata, the Layers and the Thresholds that lead there.
What is a Vestige, in play?
A Vestige is anything that survives from an earlier Cycle: a ruin, a machine or a phenomenon that not even magic explains. That is the heart of the game: you spot them, you dig them out, you decide what to do with them. The most powerful, the Remnants, cross the ages carrying an Echo: a price you pay the more you use them, detailed in the Game Master's Book.
What are the six regions of Sylkaen?
The Lands of the First Furrow (capital Nyméria), the Sands of the Suture (Skarn), the Suspended Peaks (Ailenor), the Monoliths of Vaor (Darkforge), the Canopy of the First Age (Verdancre) and the Submerged Fringe, the world-sea whose capital Maelithe lies beneath the waves. Five continents and a sea that divides them as much as it connects them, with sixteen cities mapped in the Game Master's Book.
Do I need to know the setting before playing?
No. A player only needs their people and their class: the rest is discovered by digging, which is precisely what the game is about. The game master does gain from reading the true History of the Cycles, which is not the one the kingdoms tell. The free adventure The Hand That Counts plays with no prior knowledge of Sylkaen at all.
Can I run Vestiges in a world other than Sylkaen?
Yes. The 20 peoples, the classes, the Remnants and the 50 creatures drop into any 5e or 3.5 compatible world, depending on the edition you use. And for multiverse campaigns, Planescape first among them, Sylkaen fits naturally: one more world behind a portal, with its own laws and its own mysteries.